@Caleb James DeLisle this is a nice story but it doesn't describe anything about the inverse, the high intelligence people, and the regions of high competition in the system. i think of the top of the competitive markets in new york, status games in congress, and executive boards, and i feel like as an outsider, it looks like it's somewhat gone to shit. What I see are AI grifters stealing money from VCs and crashing out, politician grifters promising bullshit and being retarded, etc. if low intelligence people could get great results doing whatever, then most mediocre people would not need to throw themselves into the high intelligence arenas to provide for themselves and their families, and could simply be content counting their funko pops. in that case, these areas of competition would have less mediocre/dumb people trying in them just because, and the competition would get closer and better. but instead when i think of people in these status games, i think of people like ol musky or $current_president, grifters, scam artists, ruthless crooks, whatever. these aren't highly competent people that gradually built up empires, but people like epstein that scammed and blackmailed and child porned their way to the top. it would seem like the competition not only has gotten demonstrably worse quality. you talk about going away from it all, and in the rat utopia, there were still rats and families that were functional that behaved similarly, so i don't think it's a bad strategy for the part of society that matches what you're describing. but I don't think your theory describes the main mechanism at play, of why all the people in power have gotten so shockingly incompetent even compared to merely 10-15 years ago